When a contact form is completed the information is sent as an email. Anyone know a good way of getting the info sent into a formatted Word document instead? I’m looking at a reasonably detailed online Application Form and would rather the client didn’t have to convert the email text into a proper form manually.
I think that would be complicated. I did experiment (successfully) with formatting the output from a form as a csv file which can easily be imported into Excel or Numbers.
1 Like
-
Don’t send whole application form content back to your applicant. Think about scammers misusing your form sending emails everywhere with fake emails. Think about Privacy and that everybody can read everything if not sent via SMIME. Think about EU data protection act coming next year where online forms with private data must be secure and encrypted “by design and default”. An short “we recieved your email” is enough - better just as a message on your website than sent by mail.
-
Come on, Word formated text? This frightens me a lot. Who is using Microsoft .doc and .docx in emails anymore? Every customer of mine is filtering them out.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. My client wants an application form on the website. Designing the form is no problem but they receive it as an email - as is the case with all web forms - and they would like the form layout to be the same as the form that applicants fill in by hand.
As far as security, the form is sent via SMTP using SSL so it is pretty secure. And the issue of security applies to any form. Are you suggesting we don’t have web forms?
As far as Word - that’s not a judgement call for me to make. Millions of businesses use Word and it remains the standard word processor in industry globally. If that’s what people have and they want to use editable documents, Word is what I need to send. I can’t think of a Word processor app that is significantly better for general use.
Hi
Machform is great. You can easily create any number of forms one either weld host or use there cloud service. The completed form can also be sent as a PDF, exported data as a excel file or viewed online.
Nigel
1 Like
Yes - I did the same some time back and the spreadsheet idea works. What my client would like however is an application form that looks like the printed form they use. I can’t think of any way to do this so I guess we’ll stick with a fillable PDF
yes, I wondered about Machforms. Can you format the layout that exports to a PDF though? e.g. columns, tables etc?
Umm. Yes I think so. I will have to check later.
With a single click, yes - forms can be returned via PDF.
MachForm returns a beautifully-formatted email - but if your clients need a specially designed form, you’ll need to enter your own html in the Email Content area.
Dave
Machforms also has a nice reporting capability for overall statistics and results. This capability (which is in addition to the basic PDF forms they send) can be set up any number of ways including how tables are done (as well as pie charts, etc, etc.). In Report Builder tables are called grids.
… so the combo of basic PDF reporting (or that + Dave’s mention of HTML controlled formatting) and the separate Report functionality may help. It’s called Report Builder and more info is here:
https://www.machform.com/features-report-builder
HI, okay I’ve understood that you want to send the form to your customer and back to the applicant. Nevertheless even if you sent the mail via TLS/SSL it is still like a postcard pretty readable for everybody inbetween.
Speaking about word. I am not talking about word as textprocessor. I am talking about open word files in emails. No customer of mine is accepting them neither I do accept emails with .doc .xls .ppt etc. files in it. They are automatically marked as SPAM and/or sorted out.